Alex Murdaugh: The Grief and the Deception Were Both Real
Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary
True Crime Today
3.3 • 908 Ratings
🗓️ 14 May 2026
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The final part of our interview with James Lasdun, author of The Family Man, goes into the question the trial never touched: How does a man kill his own family?
The book draws on decades of research into family annihilators and finds cases that are disturbingly similar to Alex Murdaugh. Jean-Claude Romand faked an entire career for eighteen years, stole from everyone close to him, and killed his wife, both young children, and his parents when exposure became inevitable. The financial fraud, the fabricated life, the final act of destruction — the specifics parallel Alex's case in ways that go far beyond coincidence.
Researchers have categorized men like this as "anomic" annihilators — men who view family as proof of status. When the status collapses, the family no longer serves a function. Every documented case features a man described by those around him as warm, loving, devoted. Every single one.
The book also sits with a harder question. The first officer at Moselle said Alex's eyes were wrong — low blink rate, staring off like he was reciting a script. But later dashcam footage shows Alex sobbing with what appears to be genuine grief. The author suggests both may have been real at the same time. That the warmth and the calculation coexisted in the same person.
The lead SLED investigator told Alex directly: "I have to put my beliefs aside and go with the facts." After everything in this book, is that the most anyone can honestly do?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Hidden Killers with Tony Bruske. |
| 0:03.2 | Here now, Tony Bruske. |
| 0:06.1 | The trial answered the legal question, guilty, but it never touched the psychological one. |
| 0:13.0 | How does a man cross that line? |
| 0:15.7 | The family man goes further than any previous work on this case. |
| 0:19.9 | Into the research on family annihilators, |
| 0:23.7 | draw specific parallels to documented cases that mirrors Alex almost exactly, almost. |
| 0:30.7 | There's some differences and builds a framework for understanding the murders that go beyond. |
| 0:35.9 | He snapped or that he's a sociopath. |
| 0:38.7 | James Lasden is with us. |
| 0:40.4 | He is the author of the family man. |
| 0:43.4 | James, the book draws a direct comparison between Alec Murdo. |
| 0:48.2 | In another case that we had talked about briefly, Jean-Claude Roman, a Frenchman who faked being a doctor at the World Health |
| 0:57.0 | Organization for 18 years. Imagine doing that. I mean, nobody checking your resume for 18 years. |
| 1:02.4 | He had a wife, two small kids, community respect, and none of it was real. When the lies unraveled, |
| 1:08.4 | he killed his wife, both kids, his his parents and the dog uh he'd been living |
| 1:13.4 | inside a fabricated life for almost two decades just like alec lived inside a fabricated version of of his |
| 1:20.3 | financial success i know you uh you bring up the parallels here in the book what is it about that |
| 1:25.8 | comparison that makes this case make more sense to |
| 1:28.9 | you? I mean, it's still deeply mysterious for anyone to behave like that. But what it offers is |
| 1:38.2 | simply the fact that someone else did it. It's precedent. And he's not the only one. |
| 1:45.3 | There are these patterns that occur. |
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